Tuesday, March 31, 2015

There. That's a title I could use. I don't know quite all it entails yet. I guess the question is how Lorca becomes Lorca, how he forms himself, his Bildung. I propose to study this not as biography (though that enters too) but as poetic self-shaping. It is a miracle, of a sort. How he became as good as he was in a very short space of time.

"García Lorca’s 1936 play appears in the collection Three Tragedies, making its genre explicit."

Well, no. Lorca's subtitle for this play is "Drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España." If after his death someone wants to put it in a collection called "Three Tragedies," that is fine, but that is an editorial decision made long after the author's death.

This is an article that points out that one of the similarities between Waiting for Godot and La casa de Bernarda Alba is they are both plays!

Saturday, March 14, 2015

If you didn't decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it.

If you complain about not having time to write, please do us both a favor and drop out.

If you aren't a serious reader, don't expect anyone to read what you write.

No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer.

You don't need my help to get published.

It's not important that people think you're smart.

We might consider a PhD version of this. It wouldn't be the same, because creative writing and critical scholarship in the humanities are not identical. Still, I honestly don't see the objections to this article, aside from a tasteless joke about child abuse.

My list would start like this:

You probably shouldn't get a PhD in literature (foreign language or English) if you only read the books assigned to you by your professors.

If you don't have serious interest both in literature of the past and in your own contemporaries...

From a follow up interview:

People think you're an asshole for saying some people have more talent than others.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

It might be that the idea of the "death of the subject" is really two or three different ideas, maybe six.

We can talk about a sort of blank writing, neutral in tone and de-personalized, arising out of Blanchot and the early Barthes. It no longer matters who is speaking or enunciating.

We can talk about skepticism about the unity of the self (Borges, Pessoa). The self is fragmented, doubled. This gives rise to a plural and hence indeterminate self.

We can talk about subjectivity reduced to its bare-bones. One is conscious and that is all. The immediate situation is what needs to be addressed. Say a character in Beckett who is trying to use his cane to pick up an object otherwise inaccessible to him.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Biography attempts to explain subjective, internal experience through external factors. The explanation for something very interesting is found in something much duller.

***

I learn from a preface to one of those black Cátedra editions that Lorca's theatre has three constants. It is poetic, experimental, and has a single theme in every play: the conflict between individual and society, between desire and social convention, or whatever you want to call it. Of course, I agree that it is "poetic," but that can mean almost anything. I also agree that it is experimental, but once again that can mean just about anything. I don't agree that his drama all has one theme.

Yeats here is talking about Maud Gonne. Since there was no second Troy for her to burn, she had to do her damage to Irish politics and to the poet's heart: why should I blame her that she filled my days / with misery, or that she would of late / have taught to ignorant men most violent ways..." The disgust against poor people arising against their betters is palpable. Her mind is "simple." She is simple-minded, not through lack of intelligence, but because her purpose is singular, uncomplicated. Her beauty is stern like a bended bow.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

This I always associate with "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought." They have the same argument. When I am feeling blue, I think of you. Yet the emotional tone is completely different. In one, the poet is wallowing in self-reflective grief, revisiting grievances from the past that should have been put to rest already. In the other, he is besieged by current self-doubt.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Everyone should know this Shakespeare Sonnet. I used to think Proust was thinking of it when he named his sequence of novels "Remembrance of Things Past." Later I learned that this was the translator's contribution. But, really, that sounds better than "In Search of Lost Time," in English that is.

For the series, I'm trying not to list poems I once knew and have forgotten, but poems that I have permanently memorized, a much smaller subset.

Friday, March 6, 2015

I used to claim that my earliest memory was my sister falling down some stairs. My parents said that this could not be, since I was not born yet when she fell.

Today I was reading a memoir my dad wrote about my grandfather. He came to our house in Michigan and put some non-stick pads on the basement stairs. So that is the memory: it most have been that someone mentioned my sister falling when we were fixing the stairs. My father wrote that my grandfather had us help him fix the stairs. There must have been the idea that we had to do it so what had happened to my sister before I was born would not happen again. I was probably four years old.

I wrote a paper about WCS's "The Jungle" in grad school for Al Gelpi. Of course I memorized the poem, and I still know it, though I think I had to re-learn it at some point, complete with line breaks. "It is not the still weight of the trees, the breathless interior of the wood, tangled with wrist-thick vine, the flies, reptiles, the forever fearful monkeys, screaming and running, in the branches..."

I remember I went to the rare book room and compared the original periodical publication of the poem with the final version.

When you forget a poem, a technique for remembering it is to not think about it too much, the word that you have forgotten, just see if you tongue provides it at the right moment.

I probably made tons of grammar mistakes in French. I never quite got the "des" thing down. My browser corrects me when I make a spelling mistake, even in French. I don't know why it doesn't recognize "Proust" though! It does when I'm typing in English but not in French?

In wanting to study Lorca through the prism of the postmodern "death of the subject" I have to distinguish between dumb postmodernism and the smart kind. Essentially, the dumb kind just sort of asserts the death of the author, the intelligent kind works through the entire process, showing exactly how biographical constructions oversimplify, and how a more complex reading works.

We have to distinguish between plural subjects and ones that are diminished, fractured, and reduced in other ways. In Vallejo, for example, it is the presence of pain, an emotional pain felt almost physically, among other things...

Quevedo's "Presentes sucesiones de difuntos." Being alive means being a different, soon-to-be-dead person every day. I think Borges must have been a very astute reader of Quevedo, despite his suspicion of writers who are primarily stylists.

4. The fourth factor is the organizational ability to put those three things together in a consistent way.

People typically think they don't have time, and many people are not confident in their abilities. Typically, lack of time is simply lack of organization. You can have a lot of time and still not get things done, or you can get things done in a narrow, finite span of time.

Success in academic research will come about when three things line up perfectly:

Your passion: what you care deeply about.
Your abilities.
What other people care about.

If you can find something that you really care about, that others care about as well, and if your talents match up well with what you want to do with this thing, then you are likely to be successful. I can give examples from my own work where I was passionate and had the ability to do what I wanted to, but where the third factor was missing. It is hard if nobody else cares.

If you care, and your audience does to, then you still need the means to get it done. If the task at hand is ill-suited to your particular package of talents and abilities, you won't get far.

If don't care about what you're doing, then nothing else matters. Why do scholarship on something you don't give a hoot about?

***

I also like to say that the recipe involves pointing out something that should have been obvious to everyone, but is not. You point out the obvious, and other people will ask themselves why they didn't think of it first. My third book on Lorca, for example, will approach him through the idea of the "death of the subject." This is super obvious to me (though I didn't think of it before now). The reason why it hasn't been done is that the biographical subject reigns supreme in Lorca studies.

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Dissolution of the Subject

Both Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch and What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity are studies of Lorca’s influence and reception. The first is narrowly focused on poetry in the US; the second contains more varied material, including extended close readings of “Play and Theory of the Duende” and “Ode to Walt Whitman,” a study of American plays that feature Lorca as a character, and an examination of his influence on José Ángel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda. My third book in this Lorquian trilogy, Federico García Lorca: The Shattered Subject, attempts to define the distinctiveness of his own work through a more direct and sustained encounter with his own work. The focus throughout will be on the variegated models of subjectivity presented in Lorca’s poems and plays. My method will be largely comparative: other major modern figures, including Whitman, Cavafy, Rilke, Jiménez, Pessoa, Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Lezama Lima, and Beckett, offer complementary and contrasting approaches that frame the distintiveness of Lorca’s poetics.

The central idea of this book is that Lorca is best approached through the perspective of the postmodern trope of “the death of the subject.”